Understanding complex inequalities through language research

Language@Leeds is a University-wide interdisciplinary network for language research. Our work tackles key societal questions through the rigorous study of language, using diverse methods and approaches, e.g., from experimental methods and natural language processing to ethnography and multimodal analysis.

Language can be a vehicle of social inclusion or exclusion in many contexts; in this event we focus on how we can understand complex inequalities through the study of language, engaging with a range of different stakeholders:

· Reducing accent-based inequalities in Higher Education and beyond.

· A linguistic ethnographic perspective on classroom interaction and inequalities.

· Exploring inclusivity and bias in a survey on bilingualism, using latent class analysis.

· Developing AI and NLP models to make democratic spaces more inclusive and accessible for all.

Speaker’s names:

· Dr Gisela Tomé Lourido, Director of Language@Leeds and Lecturer in Sociophonetics.

· Prof Julia Snell, Professor of Sociolinguistics.

· Prof Cécile De Cat, Professor of Linguistics.

· Prof Serge Sharoff, Professor of Language Technology.